New A4 flat-kit design: a 18-servo 6-legged hexapod. It does not walk (yet) but servo control works and the mechanics look good: All parts can be cut from a single A4 sheet of acrylic glass. Other parts include 18 miniature servo’s (selling for 5EUR as TopLine mini-servo ES-05 JR (at Conrad Electronic)) and an ottantottoRead more

As presented for the first time on FAB6, using a Sharp gp2y0a02 sensor the flatpack-walker just got a little bit smarter. As long as the distance sensor is triggered, the robot walks backwards. The code is still pretty simple:

Of course, the machine described in the previous post was never meant to have a sole purpose of pizza printing (which it admittedly does badly) but to become a repstrap machine so I can build a sweet Mendel. Next step after a cartesian robot is the plastic extruder. Although other people have tried to useRead more

Bringing personal fabrication to your kitchen: the pizza Plotter. During one of the last lectures I gave for Creative Technology about reprap‘s and personal fabrication one of the pizza hungry students (Symplexity) pointed out the necessary connection between pizza and production. Thus the idea for a Pizza Printer was born. The previous posts on theRead more

Some time ago I tried rep-strapping using 5-1/4” diskdrive motors and MDF wood. (see here). The motors turned out to be way too weak, the M5 thread way to slow. Perhaps a larger thread (M12) and some bigger steppermotors can save this evening of work. In this second attempt I have been using only theRead more

Old ball-type Mice make perfect resources for rotational encoders. There are however numerous different sensors. Some have plain photodiodes, some have IC’s which do part of the converting to TTL signals. Last is the case with plain old logitech mice (the ones with encoder wheel). Simply hook up the first two wires to Vcc andRead more

Finally, the holy grail in physical computing and interaction design. Lo and Behold, the internet enabled furby! Whenever you need an email-warning you can stroke, or a furry newsreader, here’s the starting point for your project.. ahum. I used a lantronix Xport ethernet-to-serial interface to connect a normal Arduino duemillianove board to the internet. TheRead more

So much for the ‘paws’, on to the whiskers. I used old guitar string which is very flexible (but does not permanently deform that easy) so it stays in shape nicely. The switch is made out of one loop of wire which normally does not touch the feeler-wire. As soon as the feeler is bendedRead more

At the protospace fablab I made a laser-cut wood version of the simpleWalker. It took only 5 minutes on the laser cutter, instead of an hour behind the bandsaw! I used 4mm birch plywood. The robot works well (and smells like a campfire … oh well…) Again, it can be seen walking on YouTube (butRead more

In the first version of the simple walker I used a custom atmega32 based board. I replaced it by a ‘custom’ version of the Arduino which I dubbed ‘ottantotto’ The microcontrollerboard is a breadboard version of the ‘ottantotto’ controller. It uses an ATmega88 instead of mega168 (mostly because they are cheaper, they sell forRead more